The Grudge

“ SHE LEFT THE HOUSE AT DAWN. I swear to God, she’s run away and we don’t know where she is. You can search the rooms yourself if you want. I’m not a powerful woman, sir. I just make my living and don’t go looking for problems. Al-Figgi brought her to me and told me to keep her here. And you know what al-Figgi can do. I couldn’t say no to him. If he wanted to he could sick the qa’imaqam on me and send the chief of police to close the place down on any pretext. He’s the one responsible for her. I’m just a nobody with no say in anything.”

“And how did she escape?”

“She took off with her baby in the early morning while everybody was asleep. Even the shushana that guards her didn’t wake up in time.”

“She had a baby? So why would she have taken to the streets?”

“Sir, a leaky faucet will end up filling a huge clay jug and the gentlest breeze might break a huge branch. I wasn’t hard on her, sir. I never did anything to hurt her. Like I said, somebody else had left her in my care, and it wasn’t my place to do whatever I wanted. Otherwise I would have sent her back to you from the very start if I’d known you were her master. But I swear to God, nobody but al-Figgi came to visit her the whole time she was here.”

“Show me where she was staying.”

Scurrying ahead of him, the brothel owner opened the door to a musty, darkened room. He stuck his head in and looked around. It was nothing but some cheap whore’s quarters. He didn’t want to think of his beloved in a place like this with some other man, especially if she hadn’t tried to bribe somebody to bring him word of her whereabouts. It pained him to think about that moment when the body numbs the voice of reason. He knew what that moment was like, since he’d experienced it himself with a certain black slave woman. His passion for her had emptied his life of all logic. Had Tawida surrendered to the tremor that had passed through al-Figgi’s body and said nothing? Had her body, after the rush and the stillness, been too paralyzed to think of running away? She was, after all, a slave woman. And a slave woman’s body doesn’t rise up in protest. Rather, it’s been conditioned to accept its lot. This is the mentality of submission on which concubinage is based, and it has molded slave women’s temperaments down the centuries. When the body recognizes itself as enslaved, it doesn’t resist the way a free person’s body would. The free woman’s body will refuse to act contrary to the convictions of her mind and, if she surrenders, her surrender will be as real on the level of the soul as it is on the level of the body.

Muhammad left the brothel in agony over what he’d heard and seen. It was too unbearable to contemplate. Al-Figgi had had intercourse with his beloved time after time in that squalid room, and not only that: She’d conceived and born a child! Why was all this happening to him? Why couldn’t he find a single thing on earth that he didn’t have to share with others? It seemed there wasn’t anything he could really call his own—not his work, not the object of his passion, not even his baby’s lifeless body. Why was it that no sooner had he found Tawida than he’d lost her again? Why was it that al-Figgi ended up being behind every ruinous thing that had ever happened to him? And why had it taken Tawida so log to rebel against her captor?

Muhammad’s thoughts grew out of all sorts of unfounded assumptions. He seemed to suppose, for example, that even somebody who, like Tawida, had been born into slavery and had never imagined herself as anything but a slave, would suddenly rise up and claim her freedom. Selfish though it was of him—whether the selfishness of romantic love or of wanting to have somebody or something all to yourself—he seemed to be thinking: It’s all right for you to be my slave, but it isn’t all right to be anyone else’s!

“Calm down,” Salem said, as if he could read Muhammad’s thoughts. “We’ll find her!”

But Muhammad couldn’t focus on what Salem was saying. He was too busy thinking about how he was going to get back at al-Figgi for what he’d done and what punishment would best quench his thirst for revenge. Muhammad’s dispute with al-Figgi wasn’t just over a slave woman anymore. It was a pitched battle against a man who had seized what belonged to him and treated it as a plaything. Al-Figgi had succeeded in luring Muhammad to the battlefield. So be it, then. Muhammad would duel with al-Figgi, and he would defeat him.

As the two men spoke, the old shushana was eavesdropping on them from the bathroom, where she sat surreptitiously taking snuff and, like Muhammad and Salem, sighing wistfully over Tawida’s escape. After they’d left, she came out and asked her mistress reproachfully, “Why did you stir him up against al-Figgi that way?”

“This way maybe they’ll get so busy fighting each other that they’ll leave me in peace. If they want to feud over some slave woman, that’s their business. But they should leave me out of it! Everybody’s out to protect his own interests, and I’ve got nothing to gain from their cock fight. Besides, al-Figgi’s gotten stingy lately. He doesn’t bring us even a handful of flour anymore!”

“So that’s it!” the shushana crowed. “If that’s why you’ve got it out for him now, just say so!”

She guffawed so boisterously that her silver nose ring quivered.

“You shameless slut!” the brothel owner fumed.

When all the shushana did was cackle more loudly than ever, her mistress pelted her with the glass in her hand, shouting, “You haven’t got a serious bone in your body, do you?”

Then she added, “Get up and take a bath. You’re stinking up the whole place! Then go fix us something to eat.”